“Then Abraham breathed his last and died at a good old age, an old man and full of years; and he was gathered to his people”
I will eventually learn not to check my messages before bed.
Last night was the second source of mourning in a row. And these things arrive in threes, which is worrisome if you are superstitious.
I am superstitious.
"Let your daddy know that his brother Joe passed away." A message from my cousin Tammy in Water Valley; Joe was her father. These things are not unexpected; Joe was 87 years old after all. And I would be a mawkish fraud if I were to rent my garments here over the loss of my uncle. We were not that close.
But I feel for his children, my cousins, who've never shown me anything but kindness even as we were raised by the Dickey boy who moved away, and never devoted any attention as a family to maintaining our ties to that swath of our clan. And this does mark a milestone, as Dad became this week the last of his siblings still on this side of the sod.
There were so many when I was a little boy running back and forth across the hay field, past the old mule-drawn rake between Mamaw and Papaw's crumbling old tarpaper-sided house and Happy and Alice's tidy little home in front of Happy's auto shop and expansive junkyard.
In my mind's eye there is tall, terrifying Uncle James, coifed with a flat top perched above murderously cold blue eyes set watery in a ruddy face, beer gut peeking out below his sport shirt with the little penguin on the pocket. We were not allowed to spend time alone with James as children--he seemed capable of anything, maybe from his time in the war or because he was haunted by his workplace mistake that killed a coworker when all of the Dickey brothers worked in the Kaiser steel mill in Hammond, Indiana in the 1950s. James was slap-ass nuts, and huge and powerful.
The last time I saw James he was fully drunk and fully crazy, dancing with reckless abandon, hands waving over his head like Baloo from the Jungle Book, to a tune only he could hear there in front of the ticket window at the fair up by Grenada Lake. Those around him gave a wide berth, perplexed. He died of a massive heart attack a few months later, younger than I am today, and gave specific instructions not to be embalmed so they put him in the ground in a hurry that summer, right next to his parents and the row of Yankee headstones where I watched him sit on a grave marker and weep as they buried my grandfather when I was six.
Next to go was Donald, the Johnny Cash lookalike, surely the most handsome of the Dickey boys and the most rakish. A first rate diesel mechanic all his life, Donald developed throat cancer after years of siphoning fuel with his mouth and a hose, spitting out the diesel before returning the lit cigarette to his mouth. I was driving to a charity ball on the beach when my father called to let me know Donald was gone, blubbering into the phone in a way I'd never heard my dad cry before. Donald had been his protector growing up, Dad being the baby of the clan by several years, his mother already pushing fifty when he arrived. The others sort of resented Dad by all accounts, resented the fact that they'd all lived through picking cotton during the Depression while he arrived just in time for the postwar boom. But Donald was his protector, and treated Katie and me with unfailing kindness while the others saw us a naive city folk with a lot to learn about squirrel stew and race relations.
Aunt Hilda, whose misfortune was to live life as a woman who looked just like my dad, sort of disappeared. She'd be near 100 now, almost certainly gone.
Her other male doppelganger was my Uncle Wayne, a virtual reincarnation of my slight, ruddy grandfather. Wayne served on a pocket carrier in World War II, carried glass shards in his scalp to the day he died after a savage beating in San Francisco on shore leave, and spent most of his adult life living with a man and working in the Kaiser steel mill where he found all his little brothers jobs, including my father, during that great flight north in search of opportunity that emptied much of the South in the '50s. He dressed just like Papaw, matching khaki pants and pressed shirt, white socks, black oxford shoes and belt. After he retired Wayne worked at the chicken plant in town, guarding the back door to keep the entirely black workforce from escaping into the woods after they clocked in. Some things never change.
Wayne died maybe five years ago; he had no kids, and somehow the funeral home got my number and went looking for guidance as to what to do with the body. It was the first time I called my father to tell him a sibling had passed. Dad loved Wayne more like a protective uncle than an older brother. It hit him hard.
Billy Mac is another I can't tell you is certainly dead, but probably so. Billy lived in a trailer tucked back in the woods on a piece of the old Dickey farm that was chopped up when my grandmother died. We were never allowed up the dirt path through the poplars and pines to his trailer; no one could say exactly what he did for a living.
The last and maybe only time I ever saw Billy Mac was in 1998. I'd taken Jimmy on a trip to see his ancestral home in Mississippi, and had just perched him for a photo on the counter of the old soda fountain at Turnage Drugs, where my own father worked as a soda jerk in high school, when the daughter of the founding Turnages asked who I was.
"I'm Dean Dickey's son, and this is his grandson Jim."
"Well if you're Dean's son, that's your uncle Billy Mac right over there." She gestured over her shoulder.
The first thing I noticed was the harelip--it runs in the family, in his case the bad repair job was hidden in a gray mustache. His thick glasses and fair complexion made him the spitting image of his mother, except for the mustache of course. He was sitting at a table of old men, drinking coffee.
I walked over and introduced myself, and his grand-nephew. He came across as soft-spoken and gentle, not the wild man of the Yalobusha woods I'd been told lurked back in that trailer years ago. His accent was so thick I could barely understand him, or maybe it was the harelip.
I never saw him again, and he died a couple years later from what I'm told.
Dad's sister Mary Alice was, I think, nineteen years older than him, and raised Dad like her own because Mamaw never got her health back after he was born. She worked her entire adult life in the Big Yank textile factory right outside of town, making bib jeans and work clothes that went to market under various brands. Alice's husband Happy was, well, happy, a guy with a glass eye who never had a bad day, never complained, always wore a visage of satisfaction as he rode around their property in his old golf cart with his dog. Theirs was the most normal household in our clan, and the gathering place for all our aunts and uncles and cousins when we'd come from one big city or another to visit. They arrived in shifts over a couple days, all of us on the screen porch and Alice holding court, making sure we were stuffed with fried chicken, greens, and fresh tomatoes. Always fresh tomatoes.
That is, until Happy died. There's a crazy streak in our family that tends toward paranoid, hermetic living, and Alice sort of fell into that in her senescence. The last time I rode out to the house to see her, three little boys in tow, she tried to hide when I rang the doorbell, but I noticed her peeking from behind a curtain in the living room window.
"I see you in there, Alice. You might as well open the door."
Which she did. We had a nice visit.
When Alice died in 2018 at nearly ninety-nine years old, I brought this beautiful woman I was seeing and determined to marry to the funeral. Peg had heard all the stories of the North Mississippi Wildmen that were my family in the '70s, a promiscuous mixture of the Dukes of Hazzard and Lynyrd Skynyrd. She arrived at the fellowship hall for the reception after the funeral with high hopes for gunplay and whiskey in the parking lot.
But alas, it was not to be. My cousins who were dangerous drunks didn't come to the service, although I was told they were still out there working just enough to buy beer. The ones sharing a covered dish were small, well-spoken and attired, and didn't evince an ounce of mirth or menace. The generation before them, the real wild men, were all dead, except for Bobby Joe sitting there at the big round table eating peach cobbler and looking very, very old.
Bobby Joe was Dad's immediate older brother. They never much got along, I'm told because Joe liked being the baby and resented the competition when Dad showed up. In my father's telling, Joe tried to hang him at six by tying a rope around his neck and encouraging him to jump out of the hayloft (apparently Wayne or Donald intervened, or I wouldn't be here). Joe placed him behind the wheel of the homemade car the brothers had made out of stolen auto parts, sending their nine-year-old sibling hurtling down a hill with no brakes until Dad found a tree to abruptly arrest his descent. After Mamaw died, Dad insisted that Joe emptied her house before Dad could get there and inventory the family heirlooms, leaving my father with nothing but a funeral bill. I'd been in that house as a boy, and can't imagine anything there that would've been worth taking except maybe the family Bible with births, deaths, and marriages dating back to well before the Civil War. That was a loss, but I'm not convinced Bobby Joe took it. Who outside our clan would care, or pay good money for that?
Joe and I had our own dust-up of sorts maybe a dozen years ago. Dad had inherited the old family homestead, a beautiful three acre hillside with two big old red cedars marking where my grandparents' house once stood, Mamaw's bulbs sprouting in a flourish of yellow and white every spring. When my folks got divorced the settlement agreement mandated that Dad deed the lot to me when I turned eighteen, to hold in trust for Katie and me. As it turned out, he waited until I was in law school and knew how to draft the deed.
A little over a decade later I heard through the grapevine (well, from my cousin Butch who lived in a tin-roofed cabin across the road) that Joe had established a used car lot on the homesite. This was a step-up from his prior career of fixing lawnmowers, but I was uncomfortable with our new, de facto business partnership. Then I heard he planned to drag a single-wide up on the hill and live there.
That was the last straw. I called a realtor, and a few days later a for-sale sign appeared on the lot. My Mississippi family was collectively aghast--how could I sell the family homestead? Your author being a bit of an SOB at heart, I suggested to my Aunt Alice, as she scolded me gently over the phone for letting the land pass out of the family after over 150 years, that if they thought it was worth saving they could pass the hat and buy it themselves.
In the end it wasn't a passed hat, but a cousin who'd married a building contractor, one of Donald's girls, who sent me a cash offer and within a month the lot was all hers. And yes, I sent half the net sales proceeds to Katie.
The last thing Bobby Joe ever said to me, there at Alice's funeral reception, was how much he hoped I could help him get together one last time with his little brother. Dad demurred when I shared that wish.
So now Joe's gone, and with him my last link to that generation in that place. I'll call Dad a little later and break him the news--at 82 years old he's taken to sleeping really late. Will he go into his usual rant about how Bobby Joe stole from him, tried to kill him, hated him as a rival? I hope not, but my father's private hell is sitting in a stew of simmering resentments over things that happened either long ago or not at all. That's his choice. I'll just be my most pastoral as I deliver the news that he's now more alone than ever.
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